Life on Mars, the BBC TV sci-fi police show, takes place in 1973. But it’s a 1973 of the mind, and this is a matter of plot, not just artistic license. The show’s protagonist, a police detective, suffers a serious car accident in the year 2006 and wakes up in the early 70s. He’s either in a coma, mad, or has traveled back in time, and you spend the whole series trying to figure that out. Despite the backdrop of swinging 1973 Manchester, the whole narrative and its staging have a strangely Russian quality. Or Czech. Even in English terms 1973 can be taken loosely. For example the show’s brown Ford Cortina, almost a central character, is a mode from 1975, and chief detectives weren’t called “guv” in Manchester in 1973. Sometimes the anachronisms are an accident, sometimes also deliberate, since 1973 is a fiction within a fiction. It’s a reinterpretation, like any retro decor.
I think I actually remember this box of Kleenex. And not because it appeared in at least 3 episodes of Life on Mars.
Wow. Thanks to fauna for pointing this out to me. The 20 ton roof retracts in only six minutes via small, simple, quiet motors run by a few car batteries. The house was designed by owner Ross Russell and architect Alex de Rijke of DRMM. Via Wallpaper.
I’m mesmerized by this door photo by Anna Dorfman-Stark, whose Door Sixteen is one of my favourite blogs. This amazing doorway is in New York City, and I’m probably going to think of it as “door sixteen” from now on. Anna is a book cover designer, so I’m not surprised she loves these doors – double doors always look like a bookcover to me. These are reminiscent of my all-time favourite book covers – the Die Farbe cover below, and the beautiful Brian Wildsmith illustrations of my childhood (click below to see more examples by Wildsmith). More people with solid slab doors should try something like this! Thanks to Anna for permission to use this photo (and to d.sharp for the photo of the “die farbe” book). You might also want to take a look at Anna’s excellent Flickr stream. See another photo of this door here.
Ann Margret as Nora Walker Hobbs in Ken Russell’s 1975 film “Tommy”. This scene, not to mention the whole film, was absolutely formative for me (and apparently I’m not alone). It opens with a drunk Nora watching TV in her all-white glam boudoir; on the screen is an ad for baked beans, “Fit For A Queen.” Nora throws a champagne bottle through the TV set, soap suds and baked beans pour out into the white bedroom, and she writhes, laughing, in the surreal, psychedelic mess.
See Hilly Blue’s excellent collection of film stills at Flickr.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay on design. Its meandering & intermittent thesis is the unexpectedly hybrid history of objects and buildings: the sheer level of cultural borrowing involved, the hidden impurity of design traditions long-considered pure, and just generally the wildly profligate miscegenation of everything. Its taste runs to the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the possibly lost promise of the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and creative mixes of all kinds. Since design isn't divorced from other things, it's also about art, social issues, urban and community planning, technology, philosophy and anything else that intersects with design, which means everything. "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, is the same upside-down as right-side-up, refers to both zeros and ones, and is pronounced uno. This site is open to complaints, nerdy critique and dissent. Without complaint and critique, design of housing, towns and cities won't get any better in North America. We do after all spend our entire lives in a built environment whose structures unconsciously influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviour, so they might as well be a lot better than they are. Dear Canada and the USA, quit letting developers run this show.
